Michael Gorman takes on two vital subjects in his postings at this forum. First, the threat to traditional accountable scholarship from the new web-centered ethos of collaborative and democratic uses of information. Second, the hypothesized emergence of a kind of group or “hive” mind fostered by web usage and now proselytized by some of the so-called digital “visionaries.”

The first development seems to me an epiphenomenon, an inevitable short-term by-product of the digital explosion of the last two decades. It doesn’t worry me so much on behalf of the accuracy of information—a fact is a fact and will empirically prevail—as on account of an attitude toward information (and knowledge itself) which seems to be on the rise. As the writer Villiers De Le’Isle-Adam wrote in his drama Axel (from which Edmund Wilson got his title Axel’s Castle): “Living? The servants will do that for us.” So in the realm of information—a direct consequence of digitally-enabled information saturation—I see a growing willingness by people to think of the search engines as an ever-available knowledge prosthesis that will provide what we need when we need it. What is too easily forgotten is that education is not about knowing facts but about acquiring contexts and perspectives so that we know what we need to look for and how we might go about looking. Information is always a function of context.

As for the prospect of collective intelligence—I do worry about this. I fear and resist any threat to the idea of individuality, which I had once thought was universally accepted as a given, but which I now see is, like everything, culturally determined. And our era seems much less interested in its sovereignty than previous eras. If an idea like that of a collective “hive” mind were seriously to gain ground, it would erode further the already eroding status of non-factual kinds of intelligence. Certainly within the scientific disciplines, and the other fact-driven disciplines, the prospect of collaborative intelligence seems likely. But in our zeal to take the part for the whole, we risk making a larger and entirely unwarranted assumption—that the other, the value-laden disciplines are likewise there to be collectively colonized. This misunderstands the essential nature of value-based intelligence, which is that it is subjective, informed by individual experience, and that its noblest end has always been individuation rather than the submergence of the self into a group-mind of any kind. This is precisely why Huxley’s Brave New Worldand Orwell’s 1984 still stand as the great minatory works of our era.